4 ms·

New Research Suggests Cancer Can't Be Eradicated

49 points by ca98am79 12y ago

deciplex 12y ago
"These ancient creatures also get cancer, therefore there is no cure for cancer". What nonsense. Naked mole rats do not get cancer, what about that? This only points out that cancer has been around for a long while - which I don't think is a contentious issue anyway - not that cancer can't be eradicated.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >"These ancient creatures also get cancer, therefore there is no cure for cancer". What nonsense. Yeah, because a scientific study can summarized from a couple of lines from a NPR article (and even those strawman-quoted in your comment). >This only points out that cancer has been around for a long while - which I don't think is a contentious issue anyway - not that cancer can't be eradicated At a basic level, this points out that cancer can emerge even with the very barest forms of life/DNA -- so it's something more inherent than something we acquired after several degress of evolution.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    >Yeah, because a scientific study can summarized from a couple of lines from a NPR article (and even those strawman-quoted in your comment). If you couldn't tell, I don't think the article is well-written and is probably an incomplete summary of the research being done. However, I think the statement I made there is an accurate summary of what the article - if not the research - is trying to claim. I.e. it is not a strawman.
- possibilistic 12y ago
  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pathways.png http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pa... There's the known linkage. This says nothing about the runtime dynamics or higher order interactions, which involve heavy calculus. This says nothing about the biochemistry under anything but isolated laboratory conditions. This also doesn't deal with anything above the cellular level. In fact, these are just chemicals in solution--none of the intracellular systems with their own local chemistries are modeled here, and those are maddeningly complicated in their own right. If you think our biological understanding has progressed to the point where gleaning simple information about single edges in this graph are elementary, think again. Most people have heard about the genome, for which we now have punchcard-level technology to deal with. The methylome sits on top of that, annotating the genome with important dynamic state. Then there's the transcriptome--utilizing nucleic acids, it's just one instance of intracellular messaging. The RNA field is extremely complicated due to its chemistry, which makes it annoyingly difficult to study. (Also, RNA isn't just messaging.) Want to get at some systems-level interactions? There are the metabolome, reactome, interactome... And we're still at the sub-cellular level. I didn't even mention proteins, which seem to be somewhat important to the study of cancer. (Actually, entire immunological systems are. Yet we're still discovering new immune cell types and guessing at roles...) If it wasn't something you already had an appreciation for, you can now see that the biology state machine is beyond your wildest dreams complicated. And really, this is glossing over things. You have to take into account a metric ton of chemistry. Unlike programming, nothing ever gets abstracted away in biology. Welcome to the defining problem of the human race--solving it, if we ever do, will likely be our grandest moment. If I could make the bet, I'd wager we won't have a cure to cancer in 200 years.
melling 12y ago
$90 billion dollars since 1971 doesn't sound like much. The interest on the US national debt is a couple hundred billion a year, for example. http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-interest-on-debt/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-...
- graeme 12y ago
  At that scale, money isn't fungible. You couldn't double cancer research by making the total $180 billion. At least, not in the same way that you could double the number of televisions you own. There are only so many biologists, labs, etc. You can certainly entice more into the field with money, but I expect costs increase non-linearly with the number of scientists. (I am not saying we can't do it. I'm saying it would cost much more than we expect from a linear extrapolation, especially in the near term. Imagine trying to use money to double, say, world food production – it couldn't be done, at least not in the short term.)
  - judk 12y ago
    Most trained biologists leave the field due to lack of job opportunities. Labs are not hard to scale horizontally, and likely aren't even at capacity now due to lack of funded researchers.
    - nmjohn 12y ago
      Yep. A BS in biology provides virtually no job prospects. At all. Advanced degrees are only marginally better. Thank god I started programming when I was ~10 and was able to fall back on that after I decided against going to medical school, or I really have no idea what I would have done with my life.
      - rjsw 12y ago
        It was very noticable when I was at school that the biology teachers were a lot better than those for any other subject, there wasn't anything else that they could do.
jboy 12y ago
The sensationalist assertions made in this article (particularly in the headline) don't follow from the results that the article describes. Part of the blame for this sensationalism seems to fall at the feet of the original scientist himself (Bosch). He makes an unfounded leap from the biological result that cancer seems to be an intrinsic property of genetic processes in cells (and the statements "You have to interfere with fundamental pathways", "It's a web of interactions" and "It's very difficult to do") to the assertion "will probably never be completely eradicated". Difficult is not the same as impossible. He follows with more sensationalism: "You carry a time bomb in your body when you're born," he said. "It can explode early in life, or middle age or later." I suppose it's understandable; he's probably just trying to get some publicity for his team's long-running research on hydra. And even he admits "that doesn't mean that, with a patient who develops cancer, there's nothing you can do." But then the hedging of "probably" and "completely" was discarded by the article writers for a more sensationalist article and headline.
- idlewords 12y ago
  I'm not sure why you see these claims as sensationalist. The lifetime risk of cancer is 1 in 2 (for men), and both the rate of incidence and the mortality rate are about the same today as they were in 1975. This despite the massive increase in our understanding of the phenomenon. The claim that cancer probably never will be eradicated seems pretty defensible. Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. It's perfectly possible for us to have a complete understanding of cancer and find that we still can't eliminate it.
  - ximeng 12y ago
    http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances-in-focus/cancer http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances... 5-year survival rates has gone from 50% to 68%, other statistics are improving as well, although not particularly quickly.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
conductr 12y ago
I believe cancer is incurable based on intuition alone. Same way my childhood self knew cigarettes were unhealthy; before ever hearing the research (putting smoke in your body just doesn't make sense). Cancer just seems to be a side effect of evolution, or perhaps a catalyst of evolution. I have basically no scientific proof of course, that's just what I think. That said, there is obviously ways to prevent and treat but that's a different topic.
api 12y ago
Cancer is not one disease. It's one symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes.
- possibilistic 12y ago
  This is something so few people understand. And even if they did, they would still have to appreciate the thermodynamics and the non-linearity of the systems involved. Medicine typically only knocks on the door with extracellular signaling. The cell remains a black box. Even if it weren't, with cancer we'd have to select certain cell populations based on internal cues that may never be exposed. Then there's the structure and pharmacology problems--there's a lot of chemistry and calculus along the path from drug introduction.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Cancer is certainly not one disease, but it in not the symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes - it the consequence of the failure of one regulatory system, the system that controls cell division. The complication comes about since there are multiple pathways involved in this one system.
  - possibilistic 12y ago
    Name the final edge in the transduction graph of a proliferation, apoptosis, or cell cycle regulation pathway. I suppose you can do this for a cell in a terminally differentiated state of your choosing. (But as you know, pre-cancerous cells are typically in fuzzy states that break our tidy little metabolic models.)
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      Cell division is by nature binary. Of course the process of division is probabilistic so that a regulated cell is unlikely to divide unless the conditions in the niche are favourable, while a unregulated cell is much more likely to divide even when division is not favourable.
danieltillett 12y ago
Of course this whole story is a typical media beat-up. We know that cancer can be eradicated - it happens every day. Even in the absence of medical treatment seeming terminal cancers can go into complete remission and never return (as a bit of an aside if anyone has any desire to become a saint the easiest way to achieve this is to go around blessing cancer patients. As long as you bless enough you will get the required two “miracles” you need from spontaneous remissions alone). Since cancer is the consequence of the loss of the regulation of cell division it is axiomatic that in any cellular system given enough time and mutations the regulation will be lost in at least one cell of an individual. We don’t need to prevent disruption of the regulatory system, although this is good, we just need to be better able to identify and destroy those cells that are not regulated.
- idlewords 12y ago
  That "just" in your last sentence is doing a lot of work.
- codexjourneys 12y ago
  Do you really think spontaneous remission is a random miracle? A scientist actually looked at the data and wrote this book: http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Against-ebook/dp/B00DB3A1UC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408706096&sr=8-1&keywords=radical+remission http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Aga... Typically there is a lot of work involved in "spontaneous" remission. But yes, it's likely we can't eliminate cells' mistakes, just prevent, detect and fix them better in the future.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dave_sullivan 12y ago
The only thing more prone to error than predicting what will happen in the future is predicting what won't happen in the future. It's hard to measure progress in something like cancer research, but in general, it hasn't been great. But the same might be said of the invention of flight. Flight had clearly been a goal across a variety of cultures for many years. I suspect that a "cure for cancer" will not come at once, it will be more gradual (owing to the fact that cancer is actually many different diseases). Our knowledge of biology is improving at an exponential rate though, I wouldn't discount that entirely.
Gatsky 12y ago
Two salient points: 1. Hydra are apparently immortal. They do not appear to age. It is likely that there is some biological trade off between immortality and cancer predisposition. Therefore they are not a good model for concluding that cancer everywhere in everything is incurable 2. Hydra don't have an adaptive immune system. This is a huge flaw in an experimental system for studying the 'roots' of cancer development. The main point of the journal article is that maybe we should use metazoans to study cancer. The journalist here is way off the mark.
jeroen94704 12y ago
It should be noted that "cannot be eradicated" is something different than "cannot be cured". I've read other articles that seem to point in the direction that cancer is simply an intrinsic side-effect of the way our cells work. So while it may very well be impossible to prevent cancer from developing in people at all, that doesn't mean it is impossible to cure once it develops.
blueskin_ 12y ago
There's a reason knowledgeable people don't talk about 'curing' cancer. Cancer is what happens when cells fail (specifically, when they don't self-terminate when they should), so it can't be vaccinated against in the same way as a disease (much as you can't catch it in conventional terms). It can be treated, the success rate of which is increasing all the time, but people will always be diagnosed with cancer if they are unlucky. For that reason, even if treatment becomes 99.99% successful with little to no side effects, it will never be eliminated in the same way diseases such as smallpox or plague were.
cel1ne 12y ago
A chemist friend once told me: Cancer/dna-mutations happen all the time. They're triggered by the energy from cosmic rays, free radicals etc. A lot of those reactions involve the oxygen we inhale, so one of the reasons for cancer and death is actually that we're slowly being burned in our hazardous atmosphere.

49 points by ca98am79 12y ago

"These ancient creatures also get cancer, therefore there is no cure for cancer". What nonsense. Naked mole rats do not get cancer, what about that? This only points out that cancer has been around for a long while - which I don't think is a contentious issue anyway - not that cancer can't be eradicated.

coldtea 12y ago
>"These ancient creatures also get cancer, therefore there is no cure for cancer". What nonsense. Yeah, because a scientific study can summarized from a couple of lines from a NPR article (and even those strawman-quoted in your comment). >This only points out that cancer has been around for a long while - which I don't think is a contentious issue anyway - not that cancer can't be eradicated At a basic level, this points out that cancer can emerge even with the very barest forms of life/DNA -- so it's something more inherent than something we acquired after several degress of evolution.
- deciplex 12y ago
  >Yeah, because a scientific study can summarized from a couple of lines from a NPR article (and even those strawman-quoted in your comment). If you couldn't tell, I don't think the article is well-written and is probably an incomplete summary of the research being done. However, I think the statement I made there is an accurate summary of what the article - if not the research - is trying to claim. I.e. it is not a strawman.
possibilistic 12y ago
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pathways.png http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pa... There's the known linkage. This says nothing about the runtime dynamics or higher order interactions, which involve heavy calculus. This says nothing about the biochemistry under anything but isolated laboratory conditions. This also doesn't deal with anything above the cellular level. In fact, these are just chemicals in solution--none of the intracellular systems with their own local chemistries are modeled here, and those are maddeningly complicated in their own right. If you think our biological understanding has progressed to the point where gleaning simple information about single edges in this graph are elementary, think again. Most people have heard about the genome, for which we now have punchcard-level technology to deal with. The methylome sits on top of that, annotating the genome with important dynamic state. Then there's the transcriptome--utilizing nucleic acids, it's just one instance of intracellular messaging. The RNA field is extremely complicated due to its chemistry, which makes it annoyingly difficult to study. (Also, RNA isn't just messaging.) Want to get at some systems-level interactions? There are the metabolome, reactome, interactome... And we're still at the sub-cellular level. I didn't even mention proteins, which seem to be somewhat important to the study of cancer. (Actually, entire immunological systems are. Yet we're still discovering new immune cell types and guessing at roles...) If it wasn't something you already had an appreciation for, you can now see that the biology state machine is beyond your wildest dreams complicated. And really, this is glossing over things. You have to take into account a metric ton of chemistry. Unlike programming, nothing ever gets abstracted away in biology. Welcome to the defining problem of the human race--solving it, if we ever do, will likely be our grandest moment. If I could make the bet, I'd wager we won't have a cure to cancer in 200 years.

melling 12y ago

$90 billion dollars since 1971 doesn't sound like much. The interest on the US national debt is a couple hundred billion a year, for example. http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-interest-on-debt/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-...

graeme 12y ago
At that scale, money isn't fungible. You couldn't double cancer research by making the total $180 billion. At least, not in the same way that you could double the number of televisions you own. There are only so many biologists, labs, etc. You can certainly entice more into the field with money, but I expect costs increase non-linearly with the number of scientists. (I am not saying we can't do it. I'm saying it would cost much more than we expect from a linear extrapolation, especially in the near term. Imagine trying to use money to double, say, world food production – it couldn't be done, at least not in the short term.)
- judk 12y ago
  Most trained biologists leave the field due to lack of job opportunities. Labs are not hard to scale horizontally, and likely aren't even at capacity now due to lack of funded researchers.
  - nmjohn 12y ago
    Yep. A BS in biology provides virtually no job prospects. At all. Advanced degrees are only marginally better. Thank god I started programming when I was ~10 and was able to fall back on that after I decided against going to medical school, or I really have no idea what I would have done with my life.
    - rjsw 12y ago
      It was very noticable when I was at school that the biology teachers were a lot better than those for any other subject, there wasn't anything else that they could do.

jboy 12y ago

The sensationalist assertions made in this article (particularly in the headline) don't follow from the results that the article describes. Part of the blame for this sensationalism seems to fall at the feet of the original scientist himself (Bosch). He makes an unfounded leap from the biological result that cancer seems to be an intrinsic property of genetic processes in cells (and the statements "You have to interfere with fundamental pathways", "It's a web of interactions" and "It's very difficult to do") to the assertion "will probably never be completely eradicated". Difficult is not the same as impossible. He follows with more sensationalism: "You carry a time bomb in your body when you're born," he said. "It can explode early in life, or middle age or later." I suppose it's understandable; he's probably just trying to get some publicity for his team's long-running research on hydra. And even he admits "that doesn't mean that, with a patient who develops cancer, there's nothing you can do." But then the hedging of "probably" and "completely" was discarded by the article writers for a more sensationalist article and headline.

idlewords 12y ago
I'm not sure why you see these claims as sensationalist. The lifetime risk of cancer is 1 in 2 (for men), and both the rate of incidence and the mortality rate are about the same today as they were in 1975. This despite the massive increase in our understanding of the phenomenon. The claim that cancer probably never will be eradicated seems pretty defensible. Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. It's perfectly possible for us to have a complete understanding of cancer and find that we still can't eliminate it.
- ximeng 12y ago
  http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances-in-focus/cancer http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances... 5-year survival rates has gone from 50% to 68%, other statistics are improving as well, although not particularly quickly.
  - danieltillett 12y ago

conductr 12y ago

I believe cancer is incurable based on intuition alone. Same way my childhood self knew cigarettes were unhealthy; before ever hearing the research (putting smoke in your body just doesn't make sense). Cancer just seems to be a side effect of evolution, or perhaps a catalyst of evolution. I have basically no scientific proof of course, that's just what I think. That said, there is obviously ways to prevent and treat but that's a different topic.

api 12y ago

Cancer is not one disease. It's one symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes.

possibilistic 12y ago
This is something so few people understand. And even if they did, they would still have to appreciate the thermodynamics and the non-linearity of the systems involved. Medicine typically only knocks on the door with extracellular signaling. The cell remains a black box. Even if it weren't, with cancer we'd have to select certain cell populations based on internal cues that may never be exposed. Then there's the structure and pharmacology problems--there's a lot of chemistry and calculus along the path from drug introduction.
danieltillett 12y ago
Cancer is certainly not one disease, but it in not the symptom of multiple genetic regulatory failure modes - it the consequence of the failure of one regulatory system, the system that controls cell division. The complication comes about since there are multiple pathways involved in this one system.
- possibilistic 12y ago
  Name the final edge in the transduction graph of a proliferation, apoptosis, or cell cycle regulation pathway. I suppose you can do this for a cell in a terminally differentiated state of your choosing. (But as you know, pre-cancerous cells are typically in fuzzy states that break our tidy little metabolic models.)
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    Cell division is by nature binary. Of course the process of division is probabilistic so that a regulated cell is unlikely to divide unless the conditions in the niche are favourable, while a unregulated cell is much more likely to divide even when division is not favourable.

danieltillett 12y ago

Of course this whole story is a typical media beat-up. We know that cancer can be eradicated - it happens every day. Even in the absence of medical treatment seeming terminal cancers can go into complete remission and never return (as a bit of an aside if anyone has any desire to become a saint the easiest way to achieve this is to go around blessing cancer patients. As long as you bless enough you will get the required two “miracles” you need from spontaneous remissions alone). Since cancer is the consequence of the loss of the regulation of cell division it is axiomatic that in any cellular system given enough time and mutations the regulation will be lost in at least one cell of an individual. We don’t need to prevent disruption of the regulatory system, although this is good, we just need to be better able to identify and destroy those cells that are not regulated.

idlewords 12y ago
That "just" in your last sentence is doing a lot of work.
codexjourneys 12y ago
Do you really think spontaneous remission is a random miracle? A scientist actually looked at the data and wrote this book: http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Against-ebook/dp/B00DB3A1UC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408706096&sr=8-1&keywords=radical+remission http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Aga... Typically there is a lot of work involved in "spontaneous" remission. But yes, it's likely we can't eliminate cells' mistakes, just prevent, detect and fix them better in the future.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dave_sullivan 12y ago

The only thing more prone to error than predicting what will happen in the future is predicting what won't happen in the future. It's hard to measure progress in something like cancer research, but in general, it hasn't been great. But the same might be said of the invention of flight. Flight had clearly been a goal across a variety of cultures for many years. I suspect that a "cure for cancer" will not come at once, it will be more gradual (owing to the fact that cancer is actually many different diseases). Our knowledge of biology is improving at an exponential rate though, I wouldn't discount that entirely.

Gatsky 12y ago

Two salient points: 1. Hydra are apparently immortal. They do not appear to age. It is likely that there is some biological trade off between immortality and cancer predisposition. Therefore they are not a good model for concluding that cancer everywhere in everything is incurable 2. Hydra don't have an adaptive immune system. This is a huge flaw in an experimental system for studying the 'roots' of cancer development. The main point of the journal article is that maybe we should use metazoans to study cancer. The journalist here is way off the mark.

jeroen94704 12y ago

It should be noted that "cannot be eradicated" is something different than "cannot be cured". I've read other articles that seem to point in the direction that cancer is simply an intrinsic side-effect of the way our cells work. So while it may very well be impossible to prevent cancer from developing in people at all, that doesn't mean it is impossible to cure once it develops.

blueskin_ 12y ago

There's a reason knowledgeable people don't talk about 'curing' cancer. Cancer is what happens when cells fail (specifically, when they don't self-terminate when they should), so it can't be vaccinated against in the same way as a disease (much as you can't catch it in conventional terms). It can be treated, the success rate of which is increasing all the time, but people will always be diagnosed with cancer if they are unlucky. For that reason, even if treatment becomes 99.99% successful with little to no side effects, it will never be eliminated in the same way diseases such as smallpox or plague were.

cel1ne 12y ago

A chemist friend once told me: Cancer/dna-mutations happen all the time. They're triggered by the energy from cosmic rays, free radicals etc. A lot of those reactions involve the oxygen we inhale, so one of the reasons for cancer and death is actually that we're slowly being burned in our hazardous atmosphere.